Sunday, 17 June 2012

Killer Keswick...

At the end of the day I was 5 minutes outside of my target time, so not a bad effort...

I have no idea why I started throwing up at 4km - I was doing fine, gently moving into plod mode, hitting my KMs in the times I had in my head. I sipped the water from the first station, and promptly my guts went south and my energy bar came north... Deeply deeply unpleasant - and nothing was different from most other runs I've done in the last couple of years...

So I retreated to the 1st aid van, sat down... I'll call this my Sophie Raworth moment.. waited for the bile to ease, and was ready to divert down the 10k route. But I started to feel better, and the guys at the 1st aid station were reminding me I had another 5 hours to finish the course...

So I buckled down, and started to walk... at that point I knew I was the last half marathon runner on the course. I expected to be last, hell my estimates were 13 miles and 1500ft of ascent and a target time of 3:30...

Then the route went nasty, the first hill was tough... and by that point some of the marathon runners I'd chatted too were going past, and sating it only got worse from here on in... They were right.

200 metres of height gain in 2000 metres... On wet, slidey grass, with occasional rubble... Oh well, after the pain of the hill from hell came the sheer terror of losing 300m in height in 4 km... Some good fell runners are graceful down hill, good runners can appear to glide down hill... I look like a terrified hippo trying to jog as fast as i can without breaking an ankle...

I hope that some of the photos of that hill descent come out, because I'm not sure if I had a grimace or a wild maniacal grin on my face... Either way it was a hell of a downhill blat...

The second loop was shorter, and a little easier... only 200m of height gain in 3km... I'd also pretty much recovered from my incident - and I'd become more savvy about my abilities on the hills... I took the flats gently, because the flats always ended with a hill... I strode up the hills (well in my mind I strode). I did miss my walking poles - lesson learnt, always take my poles. and I smiled/grimaced and looked like a running hippo on the downhills.

A measure of how much better I felt is that I ran a negative split - so my second half was faster than my first... First 11km was 1h 53 min, the second 1h 42min - and yes the less tough hill helped a lot.

And I didn't come last, I came third from last...

The question we ask ourselves at the end of these runs is will we be back... The simple answer is yes, I have unfinished business to see what this metabolism compromised, cardiovascularly inefficient system can do when nothing else goes south, and north...

So, what next... Next is a bit of recovery, hopefully a massage later in the week and then other stuff I'll blog about in the week:-D

2 comments:

So we're you the runner that I thought had bailed? That's too cruel, I was comforting myself that I'd finished, admittedly last, but others had bailed. But no. It seems you'd managed to puke, retreat, have a sit down, and still beat me by more than 30 mins. Well done. It was killer.